IL2007, Day 3: Blurring Boundaries
Posted on November 1, 2007
Filed Under Future of Libraries, Gaming |
Liz Lawley did the closing keynote, and had a bunch of good stuff to say.
TerraNova - blog on virtual worlds
TarrorNova - WoW guild made up of people involved with TerraNova
showed a pic of a library science professor who plays WoW
How can we make the real world more like games?
Make tasks delight us!
make us want to get up at 7am to play
collecting: you want to get stuff
points: we want to collect points and get more points than others
feedback: how do we know we’re doing the right thing?
exchanges: implicit and explicit communicative exchanges
customization
Then she gave two live demos - the “first 5 minutes” of WoW and Second Life
1st 5 Minutes of World of Warcraft:
- you can get a 10-day free trial online
- cool music plays
- create a character - very easy
- can choose randomize and pick the one that looks best to you or go through individual options
- click enter world - get put into the game, get an introductory narration
- go talk to non player characters with big yellow exclamation points over their heads
- help windows pop up when you seem to need them
- the game developers set up the game for multiple successes in the first five minutes of play
First 5 Minutes of Second Life:
- aside - her first five minutes wasn’t at all my first five minutes - she had some type of orientation task list, while I went to orientation island and walked through the steps….
- she flew
- a tutorial popped up
- the orientation was pretty lacking - it wasn’t set up to succeed.
- Aside again - of course, this isn’t really a game, and they aren’t really selling it….
Why does Liz like WoW better?
- no reason for her to be in Second Life
- not much for her to do there - no need or desire; for her, it’s a solution in search of a problem
- her 13 year old son loves Second Life - it’s a powerful tool for him. He can build - she doesn’t want to
- she can play with her son in WoW - she can’t in Second Life
- there are whole families that play WoW together
Nick Yee’s MMU Player Stages:
- entry: newcomer euphoria, playing with someone
- practice: ramping up, progression, solo to group
- mastery: staying for friends, casual guilds, high end content, social/community leadership, competition
- burnout: grind burnout (grind = having to do tasks thousands of times to move to the next level), social/raiding burnout, restarts, nothing left to do
- recovery: end-game casual, some do come back
Real World Games:
Tupperware - sales rewards)Super Sleuth: solve a weekly puzzle at a school, get a reward of some type
Summer Reading programs: after reading so many words/books, you get a rewardebay feedback - sort of like collecting points
myspace, linkedin, etc - collecting friends, customizing
PageRank - trying to raise your rank. She did a Google Smackdown between her name and Karen Schneider
Games that blur boundaries:passively multiplayer onlien games - sidebar in firefox, get points and rewards for browsing the web…
Sometimes, the game can be the things we really need to do
chorewars - create quests, get points, gain experience, redeem points for prizes! Huge motivation to clean up your house!
Seriosity: get currency, sending emails cost you and you have limited funds - so your email words start to matter more
social genious - helps learn people’s names, social, so you are trying to get more points than your colleagues
How can you make the library a game? Make it so people want to come back..
Raph (missed Raph’s last name) wrote “Theory of Fun for Game Design”
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Raph’s last name is Koster. (His book is a great read!) Raph worked on some early MMOs, like Ultima Online! This sounds like it was a really interesting talk. I especially like Liz’s comparison between starting WoW and starting SL. I think she’s right- there’s a lot that serious non-game interfaces can learn from playful gaming ones. I wonder how libraries could design those ‘multiple early successes’ into their user experiences…
I completely agree about WoW, not just for starting out but for the entire game. I just rolled a new alt last week and went through the first five minutes experience for the first time in many months of playing. I was struck all over again by the beauty of presenting a new experience in such rewarding and easy to accomplish terms that not only guide you through but teach you how to interact the setting (in this case, Azeroth) all in just a few minutes. I spend a lot of time trying to think of ways to present library information in a more engaging way, and I am really inspired by my experiences as a casual WoW player. I have no clue how to accomplish this, but it’s a goal. Horde for life, yo.